Do the pros play the same game that you and I do? Let me start my answer to that question by comparing tennis to another sport with which I have some experience. When I watch top men's squash players—yes, they have a pro tour—compete, I have to admit that I have no idea what they’re doing. That is, I have no idea what their tactics are. Each of them is fast enough to get to every shot that their opponent can possibly hit, from anywhere on the court; no matter how well one guy sets up a rally, it very rarely leads directly to him winning the point. I don’t know what kind of strategy you would employ in this situation, when point construction is almost without value, when cause doesn’t lead to effect. From what I’ve been told, squash pros just keep grinding, hitting the best shots they can, and hoping for two things: errors, and a loss of stamina, from their opponents.
By contrast, tennis pros do play a game with which I am familiar. For the most part, points are constructed and ultimately won the same way they are at my rec level—in both cases, a strong serve wide will open up the court for a forehand up the line, which will be rewarded with a winner. Of course, the meaning of “strong” in this case is relative, and an “open court” at the pro level closes down a lot more quickly than it does at mine. But there’s still a cause and an effect that I can recognize.
The next question is: If the pros do play the same game we do, what can we learn by watching them? It may be, as we discussed here last week, far-fetched to ask garden-variety hackers to whip their racquets all the way across their bodies on their forehands the way Roger Federer does. It’s like our 12th-grade English teacher used to say when we read ee cummings and asked why he got to ignore all the boring rules of punctuation that we had to follow: "Because he learned them first, and then learned to write so well that he didn’t need them anymore—unlike you." The same is true for the pros when it comes to the basic rules of tactics and technique that we all know so well. Does Federer need to get his “full weight” into his forehand? Does Novak Djokovic avoid going down the line because it’s the “high part of the net” and therefore too risky? Is there really such a phenomenon as "getting one more ball over the net?"
This week I’ve played tennis three times and spent much of my time at the office watching matches from Cincy and Montreal out of the corner of my eye on my computer. How many of the game’s tried and true strategic guidelines apply in both places? I'll start with three of them today.
“The serve is 80 percent of the game”
This is an axiom that an old junior coach of mine successfully drove into our heads. I was never convinced about its validity until I did text commentary last summer for NBC’s Olympics website during the medal matches in Beijing. I’d never watched a match where I had to have something to say about every point. It opened my eyes to just how many of those points at the pro level are won and lost because of the serve. As an example, look at the game today played by Murray (who was serving), and Davydenko at 4-4 in the second set. Murray hit an ace and two service winners; on the only point where he had to hit a second serve, Davydenko won it with an outright winner on the return. That was the only point Murray lost on his way to holding. In this case, the serve really was 90 percent of the game, and that's not an aberration—whether it's ace, a service winner, or a weak second serve, a vast number of points are won or lost directly because of the quality of one shot, the serve.
Aces are fewer and farther between at my level, and I can return virtually any serve hit to me by my regular opponents. It’s clear that this shot is not as crucial as it is in the pros, at least when high-intermediate rec players are fairly evenly matched—ground-stroke consistency, particularly on the backhand side, is what decides most matches. One winter, however, I played in a league where my opponents' levels varied wildly. When I played someone who wasn’t as good as I was, I came on to the court with two very simple strategic goals: Don’t double fault and don’t miss any returns. It never failed.
“Aim three feet inside the line on your approaches”
Igor Andreev would have done well to remember this advice in his second-set tiebreaker against Andy Roddick. Given an open court on a crucial point, he took a huge cut—can he do anything less?—and drilled a forehand right at the sideline. It missed by an inch and the breaker was essentially lost.
On the other hand, we have the example of Juan Carlos Ferrero, a man who lives strictly by the 3-foot rule, directing even his easiest putaways safely inside the court. We saw what happened to him when he did that yesterday against Murray, who ran rings around him in a 6-1, 6-3 win. The moral: You can play too safely.
I found the same thing to be true in my own matches this week. Up 15-40 and looking at a second serve, I decided to chip my return into the middle of the court because I thought my opponent might overhit—he’d let out a scream of frustration on the previous point. But no, he merely hit the ball hard, for a winner, and he did the same on the next point to make it deuce. With two break opportunities in hand, I should have taken a chance on the first one. At other times recently, I’ve used an extra-conservative approach shot, thinking of the old tennis mantra, “make them pass you"—Ken Rosewall used to say that simply getting to the net would win him a majority of points. More times than not, my opponents casually flipped a ball past me. Again, the moral: You can play too safely.
For the most part, though, my ability to hit penetrating shots close to the lines on a consistent basis depends on my nerves. I know the balance between safety and aggression by instinct, but I often have trouble finding it at crucial stages, on 30-all points or in tiebreakers. This is when, through no conscious choice of my own, my slice starts to float rather than bite, and I begin to loop my forehands rather than drive them. Often playing it safe, or “playing the percentages,” isn’t a matter of tactics, but the best reaction we can muster to a precarious situation. It’s better than overhitting, but you can’t count on it to work. That's frustrating, but it's what makes tennis something more than just a war of attrition.
“Recover to the center of the court”
The center hash mark on the baseline is where we stand to warm up, and where we theoretically are supposed to head after we hit a ball back. But most pros play the court as if it’s tilted. Andy Murray, who is as good at recovering as anyone, tends to position himself one step to the left or right of the hash mark. From there, he can anticipate the crosscourt while daring his opponent to take the riskier option down the line—he’s fast enough to cover it anyway. Pete Sampras did the same thing because he loved to hit his running forehand and very rarely failed to do damage with it.
As with playing a safe approach shot, sometimes this play works and sometimes it doesn’t: Against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga today, Federer hit a short crosscourt return. Rather than move to the center, he simply waited on the left-hand side of the court and gave Tsonga the down the line opening, which was the tougher shot. Tsonga missed it long. A few points later, a similar situation arose. Federer repeated his tactic, and Tsonga took the bait and went down the line again. This time he hit it for a winner.
I’ve come to like tilting the court more as I’ve gotten older. I can protect my weaker backhand, and tantalize opponents, à la Federer today, with an open court up the line. But where Tsonga may make 50 percent of those high-risk shots, my opponents spray many more—the combined number of balls they send wide, into the net, or long far outnumber the ones they send past me for winners. Of course, if I added them up, the same probably goes for me when I hit down the line. But I keep trying them because when I do hit a winner, it feels so good that I remember it far longer than I remember all the times I’ve dumped the ball into the net. But so what? If all I'm going to remember is the feeling of hitting a winner, why shouldn’t I try for another one?
Dumb shots and short memories: They go hand in hand for pros and hackers alike.
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We'll continue this discussion another day. Enjoy the weekend, whether you’re playing or watching—we’re running out of evening light here in the northeast, so I'm cramming in what I can.
I’ll be back Monday, before I head out to the beach for the last time. It should be an intriguing couple of days, especially up in Montreal.